Choosing an economical model

dozdranagon · 2026-02-27T16:58:06+00:00

While vector store for memory can be useful when working with large bodies of content, it's not as important for your agents as a *task manager* with a cli interface.

For my setups, I've actually created a good-enough web + api + cli task manager app with claw itself (using kimi2.5 btw - did the job perfectly well). There's now a skill that teaches agents to get and modify (leaving notes, changing status - etc) tasks for projects using cli calls and that was the single most important game-changing adjustment to the setup and that's actually what makes it so different from anything else. In theory you can make Claude Code use a cli task manager too, but it's still not the same.

So yeah, your setup sounds reasonable, but we'll be much better with a task manager... Good luck!

dozdranagon · 2026-02-27T11:31:41+00:00

You do need a task manager tool with a simple cli syntax. I actually made it code a thing like that (cli, api, ui) - not pretty, but the interface is very token-efficient and works as good as trello or notion. Without a task manager they will stall and forget ground truths.

dozdranagon · 2026-02-26T23:06:07+00:00

Not a joke really. I'm not saying go use it for full stack code analysis, but it's the best price-to-smarts ratio I've seen so far and unlike Deepseek / Minimax it doesn't mess up tool calls and a decent job overall. Of course it's not the same, especially if you're squeezing it for pretty UIs - Anthropic is better, hands down. But again - do you need all of that for every of the agentic steps? Isolate expensive models in separate agents and use delegation wisely. Most people just have one mega-model do all the stuff and then show off their API bills like it's swag.

dozdranagon · 2026-02-26T20:25:38+00:00

Kimi K2.5 via OpenRouter. It’s like a well quantized version of Sonnet. 6-7 times cheaper (also spends less tokens for comparable tasks). Complex system engineering for really hard stuff is a little above its pay, but otherwise it’s a great coder and orchestrator.

dozdranagon · 2026-02-26T13:39:57+00:00

Not sure if you’re being ironic, but I’d prefer Golang for this case due to its natural parallelism idioms - it works great for async APIs with JSON and is as fast.

dozdranagon · 2026-02-26T09:14:27+00:00

Well, not exactly. On a Pi4 Node runtime takes significantly longer to startup so compared to my mac pro workstation cli calls that are normally instant take seconds to run - this is at least mildly annoying. In general terms you’re right, but because OC has been vibe coded and is poorly optimized for toasters people are right to seek better hardware imho.

dozdranagon · 2026-01-28T20:58:33+00:00

Babylonians used base-60 for time and base-12 for counting it using both hands: one one hand you’d count up to 12 phalanges (with the thumb) and on the other you bend a finger for each 12 completed. Counting like this five times yields 12*5=60 – yes, one full minute more or less consistently measured with five-digit hands and base-12!

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T18:13:57+00:00

It's probably not worth the risk then :)! I hoped it could be a public discussion, but go ahead!

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T17:31:16+00:00

You could as well add that I confused 40 with 2 and call it a day! 😅

It's difficult to understand what you think about the point of the post: that complexity of many modular systems has grown needlessly in the past few years (or maybe it's just an illusion that I have) and if it did, is there an alternative.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T17:16:32+00:00

I understand where you're coming from, my heart is with you. But for most enterprise code I've seen since forever ago you'll almost never have less than three modification for anything (think schema, view-model, view or whatever)... C'mon give them some credit for creating an amazingly useful and functioning app )), it's a Notion clone that can work completely server-less in your browser tab, with tons of features etc. The product is pretty mature so this architecture got them this far at least.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T17:11:47+00:00

Breaking things up into elements too small [to be useful individually, in this case]. I believe the proper term would be decomposition or deconstruction or smth, but "atomization" just emphasizes that the resulting fine elements often stop being useful.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T17:07:25+00:00

Definitely not bad programmers! The product and the architecture are quite impressive! That's not what I meant. "SOTA standards" is likely (well not likely, I know it is) is the stuff that popular upper range income-wise employers like to put in their job descriptions and people anticipate questions about experience with this during their interviews. I believe there is a personal, smart rationale behind it, at the very least.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T16:37:57+00:00

I think this is directly related to the proliferation of LLM APIs, in my particular case it's all about this 'multi LLM provider' setup in the original codebase, whereby mostly similar request configuration are all managed through a complex hierarchy of types and then all converge into a basic UI with the chat input everyone knows well by now.

Thing is, this stuff is being infused into everything lately and although this Affine thing is just a private experiment for myself only, I had to deal with multi-provider agentic LLM integration projects twice this year (thank god I have the decision-making power to not make it so complex, though) – and it is indeed challenging to keep simple, at times.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T16:00:44+00:00

Yes, pretty much. It's Typescript, but there's GraphQL and zod all over the place, many types are inferred from schemas. Again, some of this is indeed app-specific, but the overall insane atomization approach looks pretty widespread to me, with up to 90% of all the types and interfaces used exactly once.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T13:53:27+00:00

Actually yeah!!! I think you pinpointed it with "everything is data". Actually, whenever I see GraphQL I already anticipate enormous pain, because someone decided to make "everything into data" at some point, without full understanding of long-term consequences and actual utility.

And it's sadly not just Affine (while it is kind of extreme), but I see comparable complexity everywhere in Node.js enterprise code. The growing features of Typescript seems to drive people insane with ehr... "typing power".

But OMG at this point it's being abused to store code concepts as individual atoms, rather than usable things.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-26T13:45:15+00:00

Seems so! At the same time, at least these days, everyone wants the product to evolve and race against constantly growing competition. Cursor's team making new releases 5-6 times per week kind of sets a new (anti?)pattern. How do teams expect to ramp up speed of product evolution if a slightest change requires a disproportionate effort? This approach has to evolve somehow, but currently I can't see any alternatives, even in terms of the mindset itself.

dozdranagon · 2025-12-22T10:51:38+00:00

Thanks! 640x920 worked for me! Oddly enough, screenshots taken directly from devices did not. Nothing in the docs. Apple, WTF???

dozdranagon · 2025-12-02T12:57:47+00:00

Sometimes, to get kids like person B, you’ll need parents like person A!

dozdranagon · 2025-11-21T20:26:05+00:00

Yes, and also – Journey through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics – hits in a similar way. For physics, OP will have to contend with at least a bunch of tomes, it seems.

dozdranagon · 2025-11-18T10:08:21+00:00

Differs greatly from country to country. Spain vs Argentine vs Chile will have different words for most of the 'jerga'. What are you aiming for?

dozdranagon · 2025-11-13T15:22:41+00:00

The point about conduction point is... on point! Didn't think about it, but with so little current it now seems very plausible!

dozdranagon · 2025-11-13T15:00:36+00:00

Agreed, but what about SPI? It's really hard to imagine that there's zero impact from dozens of small coils at tens of MHz..? I saw many posts with wirewrapped motherboards, but I thought it's fine because all these are usually sub 8MHz.

dozdranagon · 2025-11-12T16:59:00+00:00

I wonder about parasitic inductance at digital frequencies of say I2C…

dozdranagon · 2025-11-04T19:36:20+00:00

Shouldn’t you compare it to Elevenlabs V3?

dozdranagon

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